Development of traditional print media and other rich content (e.g., textbooks, travel books, magazines, cookbooks, how-to books, literature, and the like) may be a challenging and complicated process often involving many authors, editors, proofers, illustrators, artists and other contributors. Tasks included in developing this content may include assembling a rough draft of the content from one or more author contributions, managing edits made by editors, and managing the publication process.
Content publishers face numerous challenges in achieving these tasks. For example, the various contributors may be spread out over a large geographical area and thus publishers may be faced with having to assimilate the contributions from each of these dispersed contributors. In some cases, different users may use different document formats (e.g., authors may use a word processing format such as MICROSOFT WORD®'s document format while proofers may work with Adobe's Portable Document Format (.PDF).) Publishers are thus faced with the challenge of converting amongst the various formats and propagating changes in one format to all of the different formats used by the various contributors. Often-times this is a manual task. Publishers may also struggle to properly track and manage the various versions and revisions of the content, communicate and track problems in the content, and track the resolution of such problems. Publishers also rely almost entirely on manual proofing which can be labor intensive. These challenges are only exacerbated when the content moves from traditional print media to electronic content, as new media types such as animations, videos, interactive quizzes and the like do not easily fit into existing processes or work with existing publishing tools.